Drive-Thru Application Infrastructure Customization

By Adrian Bridgwater, May 15, 2013

Developer access to optimized infrastructure resources

The CloudShare Labs virtual environment arrives this month to offer a self-service (if not drive-thru) solution for application development and testing. The firm says that it sees growing demand for "customized IT environments", so CloudShare Labs presents an integrated self-service suite for creating, customizing, and sharing virtual environments.

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Business groups are competing for, or lack access to, IT resources customized for their specific objectives, says CloudShare.

If you hold credence for Gartner's rather specific industry estimations, then you may like to consider this comment from the analyst firm. "Through into 2015, only 10 percent of I&O (Infrastructure & Operations) organizations will be able to deliver the speed of change required by the business processes they enable."

CloudShare is attempting to both buck this trend with a proposition to give developers access to infrastructure resources that have been optimized for their specific line of business.

This technology is designed to work for complex, multi-tier enterprise applications (and simplified use cases too presumably) to create and provision environments for build verification, test automation, and manual testing. The big sell here is that is all achieved without the need for development shops to change any of their in-house tools or processes.

Capabilities include simplified bug fixing: The solution enables the capture of a multi-VM disk and memory state, literally freezing a bug in its environment so it can instantly be shared with developers and corrected without having to reproduce the bug in a different environment.

"Limited and slow access to infrastructure causes delays in release cycles and puts testing at risk of being incomplete, resulting in bugs in production. Lack of access to IT infrastructure and the limitation of existing solutions remain huge barriers to rapid innovation," said Zvi Guterman, CEO of CloudShare. "With CloudShare Labs, application development and testing organizations work faster and companies will find a competitive advantage by gaining access to IT resources at the speed of development."

Also featured here are environment cloning and template libraries. This provides the ability to clone a master environment and (potentially) eliminate mistakes caused by misconfiguration. It enables collaboration among cross-functional and global teams through a web browser, console, or SSH session. Groups can also create and store libraries of templates for later reuse.

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